Employee attitudes, rather than cash flow or process technology, most affect a company’s competitiveness, says the Stanford Business School Magazine. The following techniques will get employees to devote their hearts and minds to your company:

Start, but don’t end with a mission statement; keep your company’s charter alive by reviewing it periodically with employees.

Develop your staff by training them continually about the changing workplace.

Give every employee at least two jobs, two areas of responsibility, and people will rise to meet your expectations.

Finally, involve everyone, not just managers, in planning for the future.

Greater Effort Through Barter-Garnered Perks

With budgets, it’s not always possible to give top performers a monetary raise. But you can show them that you value their contributions by creating a variety of low-cost, high-impact rewards. Here are a few examples, and most can be covered by using trade dollars:

• Invite the employee to lunch or dinner (or give them scrip for dinner-for-two) at one of the restaurants in your exchange.
• Award him or her a one-month, six-month, or yearly fitness-club membership available through the exchange.
• Provide a premium parking space for the employee.
• Give flowers or a balloon bouquet ordered from a member of the exchange.
• Make a contribution to his or her favorite charity…ideally a charity that accepts trade dollars.
• Volunteer to do the employee’s least desirable work task for a day.
• Name a space after the employee…the Susan Smith Corridor, for example.
• Give him or her a gift certificate (scrip) for a store or service that’s a member of the exchange.
• Send a thank-you letter or e-mail message to the deserving employee.
• Arrange for a Bed & Breakfast stay through your trade exchange.
• Publish an article about the employee in your company newsletter

Do you see the benefits of barter?
BENEFITS

Think barter and grow richer:
RICHER

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3:38 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.